On darkness

The first thing to understand is that the Old Rectory is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a ‘light’ house.

In the beginning one might have blamed the darkness on the Old Rectory’s state of repair. When we first went to look at it, on that blustery spring morning, we were forced to borrow the estate agent’s wind-up torch to get as far as the first leaf-strewn kitchen corridor. The electricity had failed — years ago in the kitchen, perhaps decades before in some of the more far-flung rooms — whilst the water running down walls and standing in dank, black puddles on the floor suggested it might not be back any time soon. Here and there, damp wintry light found its way in through dirty leaded windows in an apologetic way, like a half-hearted tresspasser. It never got very far.

Later on, however, once we had installed all-new electric wiring, cleaned the glass and done much more besides, some of which will be described here, this line of argument was exposed as unsustainable. Read the rest of this entry »